In our neck of the woods... Nine-banded Armadillo

A few days ago, while hiking in the forest, I came upon two nine-banded armadillos. The first one I saw, a large adult, scurried off when I got close to it. The second one, a smaller juvenile, seemed almost oblivious to my presence. As I approached, the creature froze a few times, then it went back to snuffling through the leaf litter searching for worms and bugs. When I got close enough to touch it, the critter finally turned around and sniffed at me. PHOTO ONE AND PHOTO TWO.

I spoke to it—something ridiculous like "Hey, dude, what's up?" It still didn't seem startled. I won't say that I then had a one-sided conversation with the creature, but I won't say I didn't.

By the way... you may have heard that armadillos carry leprosy (Hansen's disease), but the risks are highly exaggerated, and the risk of casual, brief handling of these animals is infinitesimally small.

Armadillos have poor eyesight, so I'm not surprised it didn't see me. But they have very sensitive smell and hearing. Part of the reason these creatures often pay little attention is because they have no natural predators in this area—therefore, they aren't fearful.

What the heck is an armadillo, anyway? Armadillo is a Spanish word meaning little armored one. This of course refers to the bony, protective plates that cover the creature's body. There are about twenty living species of armadillos, all of them native to the Americas. Only one species, the nine-banded armadillo, lives in the United States. The others are found in Central and South America.

Armadillos are the only living mammals that have this type of bony armor (see PHOTO THREE). There is a mammal called a pangolin, with large protective scales, but those scales are attached to the skin and are not actually made of bone. With Armadillos, portions of the armor are bone-like, particularly over the shoulders and hips, as well as several bands that are connected by flexible skin. Below is the skeleton of a nine-banded armadillo. By the way, they don't always have nine bands around their middle. Nine is the average—they can have between seven and eleven.

Interestingly, armadillos did not live this far north until recent decades. It wasn't until the late 1800s that these creatures crossed the Rio Grande River from Mexico into the United States. Since then, they have been steadily spreading across the continent. When I was growing up in Kansas, I never once saw an armadillo. Now I see them regularly, both in Kansas and in Missouri, and they have been sighted as far north as Nebraska and Iowa. These critters need to be able to dig in the soil for their prey, so they cannot live in areas where the ground freezes solid for long periods of time. So, climate change is partially responsible for their rapid expansion. Missouri no longer has the really cold winters like we used to. With warmer soil, and the fact that a female armadillo can produce up to 56 babies in her lifetime, and there are no natural armadillo predators here, these fascinating critters are spreading fast.

Historically, people have eaten armadillos, but usually they have been considered "last resort" food animals. During the Great Depression (in the U.S.), armadillos were called "poor man's pork" and "Hoover hog" (because many people blamed President Hoover for the Great Depression), and even "possum on the half-shell."

Did you know nine-banded armadillos almost always give birth to four genetically identical quadruplets (which explains why we had exactly four babies living under our shed a while back). In humans, identical twins or triplets make up only 0.2% of the population. There are a few animals that frequently have identical twins (ferrets, deer, and polar bears, for example), but only the nine-banded armadillo makes a habit of popping out identical quadruplets.

I mentioned there are about twenty armadillo species. Perhaps the coolest of these is the pink fairy armadillo, the smallest armadillo species—about the size of a dollar bill. They live in Argentina, and they are so rare that one researcher worked in this critter's habitat for thirteen years before seeing one. PHOTO FOUR.

Photo Credits:
- Nine-banded armadillo - Stan C. Smith
- Armadillo skeleton - Ryan Somma, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
- Pink fairy armadillo - Daderot, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons